This week’s NY Times Magazine features a thoughtful meditation on virtual relationships, ‘digital intimacy’ and the effects of our ever-revelatory online behavior on our real-life social and emotional lives. Clive Thompson takes a look at the growing universe of social networking and broadcasting on the web (resulting in a sort of vague omniscience coined “ambient awareness”) and asks how its increasing ubiquity is changing the way we socialize, keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, and come to perceive both ourselves and those we ‘know’.
Thompson discusses the complexities of the interconnectedness we experience via Twitter updates and Facebook newsfeeds: on one hand, tweets and SNSes offer an easy, convenient way for us to ‘feel less lonely’ in an increasingly fast-paced, fractured world; on the other, these micro-connects between ourselves and our ‘networks’ may be resulting in relationships that are becoming more piecemeal and superficial with every tweet:
Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.
“The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. “I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. “They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”
At the same time, Thompson suggests, our increasingly documented and transparent online lives may be facilitating a warped return to Old World, small town social dynamics - where everyone ‘knows’ everything about everyone.
…If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.
…“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” [Sociologist Zeynep] Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically…”
An interesting evolution. This got us thinking, though: small town social dynamics are predicated on towns being, well, small. People knew each others’ business because on some (perhaps surface) level, they care about their fellow townsmen. And if they don’t, it’s still hard for them to exist outside of the town’s interconnected social structure and not be held accountable to their community.
Today our ’small towns’ are ephemeral, virtual networks made up of hundreds of people, many of whom we hardly know (if at all), existing over a handful of different websites and platforms. The residents that make up our “villages” are only as real and permanent as the versions of themselves they choose to exhibit, and our relationship to them can vary in salience and significance depending on a number of variables and choices ranging from deliberate (setting new privacy options) to arbitrary (i.e. wireless availability) to superficial (whether or not one’s profile picture is ‘cute’ that day). Our small town is now an infinite world of revolving friends, strangers, and micro-celebrities. How will the mechanics of a village society work under these new conditions? Only time will tell…
